Infrastructure Australia Audit: first ‘listen’ to the people

Infrastructure Australia is under new management, and it shows in its first national audit report released today.

Demographics, land use and infrastructure are all bundled together in the Audit, and its not a minute too soon. The mega trends in demographics and land use are the big drivers of infrastructure demand and recognition of ‘integrated infrastructure planning’ is welcomed.

But how IA proposes to capitalise on this ‘integrated infrastructure approach’ is unknown at this stage. So we are all left wondering about the types of infrastructure outcomes, how our cities might be shaped, community impact and liveability we might expect in the future. Without these types of pointers, its hard to know what IA’s big picture strategy over the next 15 years is all about.

However, while ‘integrated infrastructure planning’ language should be encouraged, putting it into practice is a whole other ball game. Thats because there remains a culture of resistance across Australian bureaucracies and industry to the big picture shape of networks and cities into the future.

The culture of silos, where transport, land use, energy and water (to name just a few) are all separate and isolated from one another remains as big a problem today, as it has been in the past.

This is where IA can play constructively.

The biggest problem with silos is that they fragment infrastructure planning and intelligence. Departmental silos prevent proper recognition of the ‘customer’ who is having to traverse all the silos at once as they live, work and play. In addition, silos prevent proper policy and design reasoning so that the community can be assured that every time a new project is proposed that its actually makes people and the network of infrastructure better off.

Remember Sydney’s Cross City Tunnel, and closure of adjacent roads to drive up patronage for the new tunnel. Such business models are destructive to community trust and are typically incubated in a silo.

Securing permission from the community to do infrastructure is Australia’s newest and biggest hurdle.

While IA appears to be trying to express themselves in the language of openness and consultation, so much more is required. Engaging the community goes deeper than traditional consultation asking ‘what do you think’ of our latest project thought bubble.

Government’s must be prepared to ask the community what are the problems that concern them most, and set up a deliberative conversation to explore how these problems can be addressed, identify the trade offs without the presumption that building something new is the best way of meeting that need.

This is how infrastructure can inject much needed innovation and drive up productivity by being focussed on the problem and inviting more ‘unsolicited bids’ to solve them. There have been too many projects in Australia that are engineering brilliant solutions but are in search of a problem. Inland and high speed rail, decentralisation initiatives and reversing rivers come to mind.

Finally, headlines leading the IA Audit like congestion costs Australia $53 billion are simply meaningless. Instead, the community deserves to be engaged about infrastructure with language and values that meaningfully impact their lives, like travel time to school drop off, access to services like hospitals, schools and amenity, air quality and can it help my kids get a job. This is the new and necessary language of infrastructure.

These are some of the issues that shape liveability and infrastructure must be slavish to them, not the other way around.